Posts Tagged ‘atavisionary’

Social media is dying. The primary reason is not because of its censorship, but because of what its censorship portends: it has given up on getting the cutting-edge audience, and wants instead to go out like MySpace, catering to the least competent users for as long as possible, then collapsing.

As an internet service, one has a choice. The service can be designed for the power users, and the rest will tag along as best they can, or when the power users leave, it can be designed for the lowest common denominator. The latter gets a larger audience, over the short term, but the former produces growth.

This creates the “MySpace cycle”: a new hip community grows from an elite of power users and early adopters, then becomes accessible to all, at which point the modern pattern occurs and the masses alter the character of the service by doing the same stupid stuff they do everywhere else. Quality declines.

With the fall of quality, the early adopters and power users flee for greener pastures. The company providing the service has grown and added dependents — more employees, lawyers, stockholders, and advisors — and is reminded by them of its need to kick up the profits. And so, in a classic MBA move, the service slashes costs and makes itself friendlier to the broadest section of its potential audience.

When we see social media banning people for stating the obvious, this cycle is in operation. The company providing the service wants more people in, and the masses always like illusion and human groups fear anything that is not “we are all one” inclusive, so the service hires trigger-happy idiots to remove anything that generates complaints. That way, they can be a safe space and bring in more neurotics, fools, idiots, geeks and hipsters.

The use of bans and censorship shows that the service is no longer interested in being a community. In a community, people exchange conversation, and with it, points of view. They are able to handle having different points of view, including controversial ones, because there is an active dialogue and difference is respected because the issues are interesting.

A service run only for profit however has no interest in community. It is there to provide an illusion as a product, and the people who consume this product — like television watchers in a former generation — want only a reflection of themselves and their thoughts, mainly because people are solipsistic and the less intelligent ones even more so.

Twitter (for example) knows it is going to die, because MySpace died and Digg died. All social media dies when it becomes popular with the idiots and then the power users leave as a result. Twitter is just trying to squeeze as much from the lemon as it can before the end, which requires pandering to total idiots like SJWs — otherwise unemployables — and if it loses some smart people, oh well. Its new audience will not care or want them.

The point of this is what we are looking at is economic Crowdism: how audience demographic shift on the Bell Curve takes once-thriving products and converts them into the same thing as everything else, thus reducing incentive to use them and ending their life cycles.

Crowdism is terrifying because it says that our enemy is not government, economics, politics, etc. but mass thinking; with mass thinking, all things — regardless of discipline or origin — are made into the same low standard, low future-time vision social-type organization. In social organizations, people compete for attention instead of accuracy or moral goodness.

For example, Crowdism has infested the world of publishing. Most books are written on trivial topics, contain little content and have no relevance except for the first year when they are published. They are mostly surface works in that what distinguishes them is the setting of the story, the unique twist on known ideas, or a novel combination of past aesthetics and concepts. The surface changes constantly, but the content is the same, much as how a Crowd will take a new genre or discipline and quickly convert it into more of “the usual.”

When people in the last century referred to something as “typical” or “common,” this was what they were alluding to. Once you let in the Crowd, they make everything into the same thing, a vast field comprised of equal — because that is the social measurement, equal inclusion — actors doing roughly the same stuff and struggling desperately to make their own variant look different. It is like an IQ test: the people who cannot see through the surface get trapped at this level, which we might describe as Sudra or Thrall to use the old Indo-European caste terms.

Therein is the problem: we cannot say that social media is the problem, only that it is conducive to the problem. The same conditions and pathological behaviors can arise anywhere, as they have in blogs and before that, in dial-up systems.

Your average 1980s BBS, once it became popular, shifted Left because Leftism is the socially appropriate answer to any question, and most people do not care about the question or the consequences of action taken in its name, but how they look to others. Boys and girls want to hook up. Middle aged people want business connections. Lonely people just need someone to talk to. Drug addicts and neurotics want far-out stuff to talk about that makes their failed lives seem meaningful. The result is constant activity, and that requires an abolition of eternal standards so that there can always be “new” (old, recombined) theories and topics.

The prevalence of Crowdism in the blogosphere leads to noticings or observations like the following:

Time out gives a man room to think. It is why vacation is an important part of a work-life balance. It is why male only spaces were so crucial to the continued survival of Western Civilization – you had to get away from the nagging wife to concentrate on the bigger picture.

Since I posted my ‘Exit’ post I have maintained relationships with allies, talking to many on a daily basis. In recent weeks I have also kept one eye open on those still blogging. What I see is sad and disappointing.

The more popular publications in this ‘sphere’ are still publishing nonsense articles about topics we already discussed years ago…The masturbatory self indulgence that many crave is happening for them, they rehash the same dead topics, they continue to abyss gaze with the same sick fascination.

Bypassing the excellent observation about “male only spaces” which can be expanded to the ideas of solitude and leisure, essential to any cogent antiwork argument as well as the right side of the Bell Curve in any health society, we see an excellent point being made: the blogosphere rewards those who write about the obvious as if it were mindblowingly complex, which makes people with nothing to contribute feel important and gives writers a way to advance themselves at the expense of others.

Begging your indulgence, perhaps we can review the writings on this site which have covered this topic in the past:

The same writers who gave Neoreaction its early strength pulled it apart as they competed for audience with blogs, books and YouTube videos. To differentiate their product, they had to each invent unique theories and viewpoints. These in turn created confusion about the core of Neoreaction, and drifted farther away, which meant they lost their conservative core and as a result became increasingly liberalized.

If we listened to the liberals at the outset, Neoreaction was doomed because it was not liberal enough. As it turns out, it was too liberal, but not by ideology but rather by the behavior of human individuals seeking to profit from it. All those blog hits, video watches, and book sales became a goal in and of themselves, and the idea of Neoreaction got lost in the muddle.

Thus the movement became moribund in the same way a civilization does: it becomes a vehicle for individuals to express their own self-importance, not a cooperation toward a qualitative end. Neoreaction became assimilated by liberalism because it adopted the methods of commerce and popularity, part of the demotism that makes up modernism.

That essay raises the question of goals. If the goal is to be Neoreactionary, that should be done, in full. When that goal gets supplanted by another goal, like money or power, then the goal of Neoreaction is inescapably lost.

Endure a metaphor, if you will: when an artist writes a book to tell a truth, he creates a story, characters, metaphors and setting to express that truth. However, if the same artist realizes that people look forward to confirmation of their existing ideas, and writes books to that end, the method of making money has replaced the goal.

We are all familiar with this process. It explains why a brand that produced good solid products a decade ago now makes flimsy plastic crap, banking on its good name. It explains why every rock band goes to a terrible place after three albums. It explains why promising political candidates, once they get into office, suddenly turn their backs on their own beliefs.

This is the nature of politics: it reverses our thought from acting toward a goal, to acting toward the reward that normally comes from achieving the goal. This means that instead of acting from cause to effect, we are acting from effect (money) and inventing a cause (the book) to match. It is a form of corruption of will.

This is what has happened to Neoreaction. In the struggle for individuals to differentiate themselves and gain an audience, they have moved from writing about relevant topics to writing about that which they know will cultivate an audience, and for that concern alone. This has distorted their message and created entryism by demotism.

[I]n an effort to attract a popular audience, [Neoreaction] reduced itself to a form of individualism. This happens to all internet movements as people want to join so they can appear “edgy,” but fear getting too far from socially acceptable ideas.

My point to the DE/NeR was basically that if your philosophy is functionally similar to conservatism, and you don’t admit it, you’re avoiding the truth out of some personal pretense. Further, this confines your thinking based on the taboos of liberalism, which means you’ll end up back at liberalism. Then I pointed out many of the liberal aspects of the DE, namely that its crusade against the Cathedral is a liberal-style revolution, e.g. an attack against the institution and its replacement with people power. What we actually need is an idea of what we want and thus a competing vision to the current set of pretenses held by our new elite.

Most of Neoreaction and many of the Right choose to ignore my 20-plus year history of writing on the same topics they now approach. This is not solely because I am obnoxious, but because I threaten them. If someone else wrote it before, and possibly better, others become irrelevant. In turn, I find it hard to link to much of “Neoreactionary” writing because it is simply going over old ground and often, doing so with more of a robotic outlook.

In the past, I have warned Neoreaction that it veers too close to become a Leftist-style ideology because Neoreaction has come to include the principles of collectivized individualism. Any time you find yourself arguing that there is a “system” which will manage people and come to good results, you have left behind the fundamental distinction of Dark Enlightenment societies: they believe in hierarchies and moral codes, and therefore, they select the morally best as leaders.

What is subverting Neoreaction is what Neoreaction was designed to avoid: “demotism,” or a substitute for leadership where whatever idea is most popular is chosen. Demotism occurs in politics through democracy, in economics through consumerism, and in socializing through flattery. Neoreaction has been subverted by its inability to purge its opposite from itself, because when emerging from a political system the most common tendency is to carry over unseen elements of that system into the post-revolutionary future society.

The same conflict that crushed Napoleon crushes Neoreaction. He wanted to be a King, but with the revolutionary ideology of egalitarianism behind him. These two ideas conflicted, and so he became a tyrant, using the advertising of the ideology of altruism to justify his seizure of power and wars to enforce these ideas on others.

Neoreaction has stopped moving in a linear direction toward a goal, and instead is circling itself, trying to rid itself of an entryist it cannot identity.

</blast beat>

I came from another tradition of writing about these topics: European philosophy, starting in the late 1980s, with a somewhat idiosyncratic take — as is appropriate for any philosophical exploration, to avoid the confinement of crowd-defined language — on society. I posted rants to hacker bulletin boards, published an ezine, raged across USENET, then began distributing my writings through an early underground website, the American Nihilist Underground Society, then CORRUPT which pre-dated the “alternative right” idea with a similar concept, many web bulletin boards back in the day, and finally transitioned to Amerika.

My influences were Friedrich Nietzsche and the philosophical and literary canon, underground (heavy) metal, and life experience. In addition, newer writers like Michel Houellebecq and Ted Kaczynski were massively influential, as well as the rants and outlook of outsider communities like the hacker underground and the heavy metal underground.

Others from the same era picked up the pen and began waging war — words are bullets — through increasingly clarifying statements. One of these, Bruce Charlton, recently penned a pointed critique of the Alternative Right (a silo in which he includes Neoreaction, probably because Neoreaction has been absorbed by it) which was widely ignored by online reactionaries because it hit too close to home:

The (online) excitement among the Alt-Right since they were mentioned in a speech by Hillary Clinton – and since it becomes clear that Donald Trump is (de facto) running unopposed – is palpable.

And it is natural; since the secular Right always sells-out, and opportunities for the secular Right intellectuals to be bought-off, co-opted and in general sell-out (for power, status, cash, sexual opportunity etc.) are looking very good, just at present.

No wonder the leading Alt-Right bloggers are so cheerful!

His point is that political movements default to a focus on people and material concerns when they do not have some transcendental goal, which we can observe happening in Neoreaction and the Alternative Right because to succeed as a blogger there, one must dumb down the message and tell the Crowd that it is the victim. This re-starts the liberal cycle under a new name, in a classic Crowdist gambit, and is not deliberate but is even more destructive than if it were, because the people who now think they are solving a problem are in fact bearing a mental infection that will reproduce the problem.

Inversion, in other terms.

Earlier on, this post mentioned how the threat of censorship and bans on social media services like Twitter destroys the prospect of community. To last, a community requires a transcendental goal, such as the idea of accuracy in information itself, or that problems can be beaten and beauty, goodness, truth and excellence restored through realism plus a gumption that demands a higher aesthetic quality of life; pleasure, even.

When dissident movements become inverted, they lose this sense of community and replace it with a false sense of community based on universal inclusion. At that point, they become Leftist in all but name, and many of the recent attempts to control the narrative are done solely in this aim, even if they state otherwise.

Any incoherence or challenges must then be met, unless they present such a challenge that the model proves wrong. As a result, strict and active management of new ideas must be enacted, prior held ideas which are incompatible must be dismissed, strong discipline must be maintained intellectually to such a degree that those who undermine the tradition are made aware of this issue and encouraged to correct, or stop claiming to be part of the tradition. Relaxing of intellectual rigour and doctrine for mere social requirements should be dismissed as rank stupidity.

…Much of what gets released under the neoreaction banner is intellectually incoherent.

Crowdism has infested social media, but it will infest any platform, and it has infested Alt Right and Neoreactionary blogging. The solution is simple: return the focus to ideas and action, not people. But that will never be as popular as social thinking, so instead, focus on the quality blogs like New Alternative Right, Atavisionary and many of the others listed in our blog list.

Last week, superstar Kanye West tweeted: “I got rid of my phone so I can have air to create.” Singer Katy Perry replied: “unplug to connect.”

Stand-up comedian Brett Kline got so frustrated with smartphone selfie sticks that he made a video of him snipping them with bolt cutters all over New York. It turned out to be a prank, with fake phones and actors as the victims, but the video has more than 1.3 million views on YouTube since Sept. 1.

“Technology is making people sociopaths,” says Buddy Bolton, a comedian who recorded the selfie-stick clip-and-run incidents with Mr. Kline.

These people do not mean they literally got rid of their phones, but that they are using their phones as phones again instead of small portable computers ideally suited for social media.

This is a result of the Myspace cycle described above, but applied not just to the aging big social media services (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit) but to social media and the internet itself. Once, it was a new frontier, because the Crowd had not arrived. Then Google, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft made it brain-dead easy to get on and use it, and then social media arose. At first, that was a new space, but then all the people that the people on social media were trying to flee showed up there as well.

Now, it is a bother where most of what is being posted is the same brainless drama that is spoken of at the water cooler, at family dinners or shown on daytime television. People want out as a result. The exact same phenomenon is happening to Neoreaction and Alternative Right, and those who care about the power of those movements should flee the dying zone and head toward a higher level of behavior immediately.

Many of you know the work of Atavisionary, who is not only a Neoreaction blogger but runs a lone outpost of sanity on Leftist hivemind Reddit, /r/DarkEnlightenment. He has recently published his first book, Smart and SeXy, which details sex differences in intelligence and other abilities and from that builds a devastating case against feminism and its massive dysgenic effects. He was kind enough to take a few hours to answer some questions on the topics of Neoreaction and related disciplines, as well as his own work.

What drew you to Neoreaction? At what point in your life did you “awaken” from the modern slumber, and what were the pivotal events?

I take this to mean you want to know what history or experiences led up to me joining neoreaction.

I have never been prone to political correctness because I have always had a very independent streak in evaluating what I was told as well as a strong natural curiosity. Anything I decide to have a strong opinion on, I try to research thoroughly and come to conclusions based on the totality of information I accumulate. I don’t take things at face value or believe them just because I am told to.

For example, I remember in high school the class was forced to read this really bad feminist book called “speak” and though this was long before I had much, if any, idea about the cathedral I just instantly and unambiguously found the story repugnant. In short, the story was boring, it didn’t make sense, and it was incredibly gynocentric. You can see my brief review for more details. “Speak” was and is blatant feminist propaganda. The political goal of this propaganda was to convince everyone that when a girl regrets consensual sex, we should consider it rape. This goal, of course, is the main reason the whole narrative makes no sense from the very beginning. You can’t have the girl’s internal monologue saying she wants this guy, then half way through doing it change her mind and expect a rational human being to believe it was actually rape. I very vividly remember hating this book for this and other reasons, and this hatred was a fairly clear precursor to my moving toward neoreaction. I had it in me from the beginning so to speak. In other words, I was probably always going to get here eventually via one trajectory or another simply because it was in my nature to hate progressive crap before I even knew what it was.

The first time I consciously started to realize the typical narrative was nonsense was probably when, at the suggestion of a college friend, I started listening to a radio show host called Tom Leykis. For those of you not familiar with him, he basically was saying all the things the current red pill/pua culture was saying years before the modern internet community got going. I was a young college guy at the time when I was listening to him regularly, so you can understand my mindset at the time. Obviously I have done a lot of growing up since then, but it was the stories he would present about guys getting screwed with alimony and child support which especially red pilled me on feminism and family law in modern America. This also got me into the habit of looking out for feminist propaganda, and to automatically exercise a lot of healthy skepticism at anything which painted women as victims. Later on I would spend a lot of time on /r/theredpill which had very similar views and had similar discussions. I was active there when it was between 5,000 (when I joined) and 25,000 members. At that point I started moving away from it. I learned a lot during this time period, but after a while new information seemed to be lacking and I sensed I wanted something more. Basically, the red pill gets pretty repetitive after a while because it artificially creates barriers between sexual strategy and the rest of life and really there is only so much to say on sexual strategy. A lot of guys like me in neoreaction and related communities may be guilty of an addiction to what some call “insight porn.” Basically, novel ideas that seem to explain observable patterns, and because it is so limited in scope you can parse everything you need to know about the red pill in a relatively short time. It is good they do what they do because newbies need a constant feed of basics, and they probably aren’t ready to go any further down the rabbit hole before having time to digest the surface level stuff.

At some point after I began listening to leykis but before /r/theredpill was formed, I decided to pick up the bell curve. I can’t recall exactly where I got this notion, but it was probably a natural evolution that resulted from looking at male/female IQ data because many of those sources will at least briefly reference racial differences as well. This book of course had a very similar effect as the manosphere but with respect to race instead of gender. Affirmative action always seemed like a very bad system to me, and one which was obviously going to harm my economic interests (as well as my relatives and children) in the future. You don’t really need any particular background to grasp that. The bell curve went one step further in showing that the primary justification for having affirmative action, so-called discrimination, was almost certainly non-existent. After that, I was pretty firmly in the race realist camp.

These events as well as probably thousands of much more minor ones were enough to slant my opinion in a reactionary direction, but not enough to paint a complete picture. What kept me learning more was my weakness for engaging in arguments on forums and in comment sections on reddit. People would make blatantly wrong claims, and I would argue with them and in the process do a lot of research. Typically I would find some study on racial IQ differences or some stats about who pays most of the child support money and I would use this information in my arguments. I learned a lot of stuff during that time and it shifted me more and more against the narrative. Don’t bother looking up any of these comments because I made them under different accounts which are now deleted.

So I had all this stuff going on in the background, and I was researching my book on sex differences in intelligence at the same time, when someone on /r/theredpill posted a link to moldbug’s “A gentle introduction to unqualified reservations.” This was around the end of 2013 or the beginning of 2014. Obviously I had a great deal of thought-crime already percolating in my head before I got to this point, so those things weren’t my major take-away from it. I held in my mind most of the important modern pieces of information. Specifically evolution, evolutionary psychology, HBD, and group differences which have only been thoroughly cataloged in a rigorous way in the last 115 years or so. It was moldbug’s concept of the cathedral which really tied the room together. It was a narrative which took all these things I already knew about and gave them a philosophical and especially historical structure. It definitely explained my experience with hopelessly ideological progressives. They were pseudo-atheistic religious zealots, not rational actors. Their behavior and stubbornness in the face of all evidence makes a lot more sense from that perspective. Well, I was so inspired by this structure that I decided to take control of the /r/darkenlightenment subreddit on a whim. Between a large amount of commenting, and the work on writing the book, I had a lot of material and thought it would be better to have my own blog to post some of this stuff. About 6 month after taking on the role of head mod at /r/darkenlightenment, I started atavisionary.com and began writing articles based on everything I had learned up until that point. I would say I have had reasonable and moderate success as a neoreactionary writer since that point.

Do you have a personal interpretation of neoreaction that differs from the canon?

Not anything major I don’t think. You can see from my background that my trajectory towards neoreaction was heavily focused on the red pill and hbd. Even now those are the topics I am still most interested in. As far as I am aware there is nothing about the information contained in either of those which is contradictory toward neoreaction, moldbug’s original writings, or any of the main work in neoreaction that came after moldbug.

Keep in mind that I make a distinction between non-ideological facts and how those facts are used. The PUA lifestyle clearly isn’t good for civilization, but that doesn’t mean the information they are using (evo psych) is wrong. You can just as easily use the information the PUAs have written about to make a marriage more secure. Moreover, I don’t think anyone is doing themselves or society a favor by getting embroiled in onerous alimony and child support payments. But no one is doing themselves or society a favor but avoiding children either. It is a tough situation with pretty much no good options. Probably the best solution is to try to go the traditional route if you can, and if your wife and the state try to divorce rape you just disappear to deprive both vampires their blood. Of course, do everything you can to avoid that clearly drastic step. However, I don’t think men should willingly enslave themselves to the family court system and depriving it of cash is more valuable in the long run than even your own children. Now that last bit is my own thoughts and likely isn’t the most popular idea in neoreaction generally, but of course it is in the red pill communities. I think it could be considered neoreaction when you consider the long-term goal is to frustrate or cripple the funding of family courts so that traditional family structures have a chance to be re-instated.

I would like to add that asking a (successful) PUA for marriage advise would be a lot better than marxist/feminist marriage “counselors” a lot of guys are dragged to. By that I mean he would be able to explain evolutionary psychology and social dynamics which would be way more helpful than bland “the man is always wrong” stuff you would get from feminists. If nothing else, the PUA community added a lot of useful information to our understanding of socio-sexual dynamics in reality. Many in neoreaction may not agree with the methods, but like western medicine did with the Nazi experiments, we can just forget the source and use what was learned for the greatest possible benefit.

Stepping away from internal neoreaction disagreements to our interactions with outsiders, I think the most heated disagreements people have with the canon typically involve your stereotypical white nationalists. Compared to progressives who focus more on trolling and snide, smug and sarcastic comments, white nationalists tend to get very angry, very quickly. Think of the ones who get rabidly angry and acrimonious when you suggest the problem might not be solely caused by Jews. Sometimes I am not sure if these people are legitimate or just trolling (or shills hired by governments to make any sort of white identity movement seem crazy). Its a Poe’s law scenario. Let’s pretend for a second they aren’t as raving mad as they present themselves and that they aren’t shills.

First, I can understand why they get so mad at Jews. It is a fact that Jews are disproportionately involved in leftism whether it is in creating media or funding NGOs. When there is an article that is egregiously anti-white a lot of times there is a Jewish name attached. A lot of people notice this. I notice it. Most of the writers in neoreaction notice it. It gave the alt right the recent (((echo))) meme. I think there is good reason for European whites to be irritated by this advocacy and that as a group we really shouldn’t be tolerating it.

That said, Jews are still only around 2% of the US population. Money or not, media or not, they couldn’t push the cathedral ahead by themselves. And they didn’t. There are more white, European progressives than there are Jews of any political affiliation. We can also look at examples in history where it was clearly the cathedral in action, but with virtually no influence from Jews. The abolitionist movement and the resulting civil war, for example. The women’s suffrage movement and the resulting prohibition in another. Jews tend to do fairly well at many different intellectual tasks. They are also good at supporting and advancing the contemporary popular ideas, which in our society is progressivism. That is mainly just about fitting in with the culture of the current elites who are overwhelmingly globalist and progressive. This is why I think Moldbug had it right in calling progressivism a non-theological christian sect. You can definitely trace down the history of progressivism and see that in the mid-1800s it was very much tied in with certain denominations of the Christians. You can also contrast modern progressive beliefs with certain aspects of more traditional christian theology and there are some striking similarities. In other words, the ethnic Jews who are progressives are converts from Judaism to crypto-calvinism who happen to be particularly good at sophistry compared to other elites. That doesn’t absolve those other elites of their progressivism or mean that sophistry by 2% of the population is enough to control the culture.

Blaming Jews for our problems is exactly like blacks blaming whites for their problems. It is fairly clear that blacks are largely responsible for their own issues and that the white majority has thrown tons of money, time, and hand-wringing at legitimately attempting to lift them up. It has failed because you can’t change genetics without genetic engineering or eugenics. Having, on average, an 85 IQ prevents widespread success of blacks in the US. In other places there was no admixture with whites, so the average IQ is even lower as is the chance of successfully building a civilization. Blaming whites for black dysfunction is obviously ludicrous for most white nationalists, yet they turn around and blame Jews in the exact same way blacks blame whites for problems with our group.

The major issue with white Europeans, at least from NW Europe, is that of ethnomasochism. Basically, north west Europeans apparently evolved to use guilt (as opposed to shame) in regulating communities for pro-social behavior. NW Europeans avoid certain behaviors because of a feeling of internal guilt from doing them. Most other ethnicities rely on shame for this regulation. In other words, it is more about avoiding everyone knowing you are a jerk than truly worrying about an act being bad. Now this tendency for guilt based regulation has a lot of benefits and is what makes a high-trust society possible. A high trust society functions better because widely distributed cooperation leads to everyone’s enrichment. I would also argue this natural tendency has a lot to do with why the concept of sin became so common and accepted in European society in the past. Sin is a concept which provides an explanation, true or not, for a set of feelings that are ubiquitous among Europeans. Unfortunately, this guilt can be over-tuned and misattributed which is how we get ethnomasochism. I think this is the real heart of white, European weakness. As a heritable trait, it obviously can’t be caused by Jews. And it can also be very difficult to address. It is unlikely we can get rid of this excessive guilt, and even if we could that eliminates one of the most unique characteristics that makes Europeans European. It is probably also a key ingredient in our high trust societies, societies I would argue are worth keeping because of their myriad of advantages over shame regulated societies.

In my opinion, the major goal of any group wanting to ensure the continuation of white races should be eliminating race as an accepted explanation for white guilt. Whatever guilt whites may feel intrinsically is in no way related to the dysfunction of unrelated ethnic groups. The christian concept of sin would probably work well for most of the population, and the evolutionary concept of guilt culture could work for academics. Eliminating ethnomasochism as an accepted meme would go a long way in shifting our cultures back to a sustainable path.

What is Neoreaction, for those who are not familiar with it? How would you summarize it?

I would say look at my sidebar on my subreddit. That is probably the most concise summary you can find anywhere.

Hierarchies are a natural consequence of innate differences and are necessary for societies to function. Stratified outcomes alone are not enough to prove discrimination or a failure of “social justice”. There is no “social justice,” only traditional justice.

The only morality is civilization. Any belief or ideology that works against civilization is evil no matter how well-intentioned.

A system of No Voice-Free Exit in large hyper-federalist states or small independent city states is the optimal political arrangement. Singapore is an imprecise example with little political voice, but massive economic freedom and high levels of prosperity. City-states would be in constant competition for minds and business and risk losing economically valuable citizens and businesses if poorly run since they can easily relocate. This creates an incentive to remain economically and socially free.

Neoreactionaries accept human biological diversity. Individual humans and human groups differ in ability, psychological disposition, intelligence, and other traits for genetic reasons. Genetics can explain 50% or more of the differences in lifetime outcomes within and between human groups. Other factors are minor by comparison.

Is there any overlap with other movements such as paleoconservatism, reaction, new right, alternative right and white nationalism? What is different and valuable to you about the Neoreaction platform?

I would say there probably is an overlap between all of those movements. My preferred way to think about neoreaction is that it is not itself a movement, but a philosophy or even just a series of thought experiments. If neoreaction is not a movement, then it is not competing with any of those things. Rather, it is about putting ideas and concepts into highly explanatory writing. This can then be used help people break away from progressive propaganda. The writings of neoreaction should be usable by any of the groups you mentioned to help support their philosophical and argumentative basis and thus build their attractiveness.

Basically, the goal of neoreaction is to take all or most of the assumptions of modernity and try to analyze them from a perspective that values truth above everything else and very self-consciously tries to avoid modern progressive biases. In practice, avoiding progressive biases largely means disregarding feminine concerns for feelings. It doesn’t matter if group X doesn’t like some inconvenient truth, we are still going to write about it and pursue threads where they take us, no matter how dark or how loudly some cry-bully wants to complain about it.

One good method for doing this is to try to imagine what people in the past, maybe hundreds of years in the past, would think if they were to see the world as it is today. I think Moldbug did this very expertly and in such a way that he was able to by-pass a lot of people’s programmed aversions to wrong-think. This, I think, is Moldbug’s and perhaps neoreaction’s greatest contribution. Dismantling progressive indoctrination in “respectable” high IQ people is no easy task and I think neoreaction does this better than any other far right faction. The most talented and intelligent people are typically the ones you want on your side because they are best able to further alterations to the culture at large. Politics are downstream of culture, so changing the culture should be our first priority. High IQ, former progressives can actually build the sort of intellectual capital needed to start changing the culture back to something sensible. This is why it is so important to wake them up, and why neoreaction specifically tries to cater to that demographic. This is, I would guess, one of the main things distinguishing neoreaction from the other movements. We create content the intellectual elite can tolerate long enough to start changing their minds.

You have just released a book, Smart and SeXY, about gender differences as revealed in research. What would someone take away from reading this book?

You already know some of that history from my description of what led me to neoreaction, but I suppose I can give a bit of history about how the book got started specifically. Around 2010, I was taking a class on genetic causes of mental illnesses as a biology elective in getting my degree (biochemistry) and this is when the idea for my book came to me. Now keep in mind that I already had both the standard education in biology and genetics as part of my degree as well as a lot of self taught information on IQ differences between race and gender as a result of these internet arguments. In other words, I was already very familiar with the differences between the male and female intelligence distributions. I was also familiar, from genetics, of a concept called pseudo-dominance. Pseudo-dominance results from recessive mutations on X chromosomes being directly expressed as a phenotype much more often in males. The stereotypical example is that of the white eye mutation in fruit flies. So when the professor started discussing how mental disorders and retardation are much more common in males all these things just came together and it clicked. I raised my hand to ask if nervous system genes are over-represented on the X chromosome and the professor said that was a long established fact. I decided at the time not to reveal what I had just figured out to the class and it didn’t register with them of their own accord. There was no reason to potentially provoke people right then and there, anyway. What I realized, in short, was that genes expressed in the nervous system were obviously over-represented on the X chromosome. This explains the greater variation in the male intelligence distribution as well as the greater incidence of retardation in males. This is the final nail in the coffin of feminism. If intelligence is X linked, then you don’t need discrimination AT ALL to explain outcome differences even between closely related individuals. Since we know that intelligence differences between gender have a biological cause it means that feminist complaints are frivolous and affirmative action for women is a complete waste of time.

This is easy enough to understand, but as you know the typical leftist would just deny it repeatedly until people stopped talking about it; never bothering to check if it might be true. This was why it was so important to actually compile all the current available evidence for this concept. The plan was to provide so much information and sources that this sort of head in the sand tactic most leftists engage in would be ineffective when used against people who had access to the book. When a leftist tells you to “prove it” you have literally hundreds of citations at your disposal. The book provides a modern, scientific basis for gender differences which can be used to show that current complaints about gender equality are nonsense and also supplement or boost historic arguments for traditional gender roles. Before the book, I think this avenue (modern scientific research) for defending tradition was woefully under-utilized. It is especially effective because while leftists deny most traditions, they claim to support and want to advance science. In order to persist in their delusions about gender equality, they would have to start denying what they claim to be for. I can imagine that is going to cause a lot of cognitive dissonance on their part.

Another thing worth keeping in mind is that during the research I discovered that this explanation for sex differences has been suspected by geneticists since 1972. 1972!!! Yet I had never heard anything about this in any of my biology or genetics classes at a major university. This was not an accident in my opinion. This topic and explanation have been suppressed or ignored by the academic establishment for political convenience. My hope is that my work will make it so that they can’t ignore it anymore, and that it will become a target of more direct research.

How does awareness of genetic differences between the sexes factor into understanding a Neoreaction or right-wing platform?

The over-arching goal of most western right-wing movements is to preserve western civilization for ourselves and especially make it available for all of our descendants. By “our” I am very specifically referring to white Europeans and their descendants throughout the world. Two very major problems are caused by female “emancipation” which are in direct contradiction of that goal. There are of course other things of concern, but I am only referring to gender relations here. The most important is the lowering of the birth-rate of ethnic Europeans. It is well-known that most European populations have a birth-rate under replacement level and that if this continues European ethnicities will eventually cease to exist. Unfortunately, our time to fix this problem is much less than it could be because of our mass importation of swarthy people from around the world. Most of these groups have a higher birthrate than the native populations and won’t hesitate to subjugate them once their numbers reach a critical mass. If we don’t do something in the next couple of generations it is very likely we will start seeing the events that have destroyed South Africa and Rhodesia repeated in most western countries. At that point however, there won’t be a strong US or European countries to suppress white interests from overseas like in those cases so I imagine things would get very bloody indeed. This is something that could and should be avoided.

Female education and employment are directly causal of this low birthrate. Setting women on paths other than motherhood obviously has a direct negative impact on birth rates. However, it also has an indirect negative impact on birth rate because it interferes with the male ability to signal provider status to the satisfaction of female hypergamy. If you take jobs from men and give them to women artificially through government regulations, you cause a lot of men to not be able to get jobs at a level they are capable of. These men are much poorer than they need to be and thus their ability to attract wives is substantially reduced. Mass immigration policies, affirmative action for swarthies, and free trade agreements do something very similar by increasing labor competition and even giving unfair and unearned advantages to the new-comers. All these policies are extremely bad for working class whites (and blacks descended from the original slave population in the US). Some men may be consciously choosing not to have kids and just play video games, but it shouldn’t be underestimated how much the lack of decent employment opportunities for white men are killing the west.

There is also another problem, not as dire but still important. As is shown in the book, the most capable humans a population is able to produce are going to be almost exclusively male. By setting up quotas for women you introduce massive inefficiencies in the economy which reduces the wealth of the country as a whole and thus its ability to maintain itself and a good standard of living for its people. This is partially the result of putting women into positions they aren’t psychologically or intellectually suited for and also through the creation of make-work jobs which require massive wealth redistribution from taxpayers. Most taxes are paid by men and that is all wealth those men can’t use to have 1 or 2 additional children.

Understanding the biological differences in intelligence, then, are very important in articulating why what we are doing today in these massive wealth redistribution plans are ultimately pointless and actively harmful. Our policies are based on a false premise: gender equality. By knocking out that premise you destroy the justification for some of the worst policies that are causing the collapse of the west. These are all things that traditionalists have all addressed before, but now that have more ammo for their arguments that didn’t exist in such a condensed form before.

You also write regular articles for your own blog. Can you explain the “atavisionary” concept for us?

The word atavisionary is a combination of atavism and visionary.

At·a·vism
[at–uh-viz-uhm]

noun 1. biologya. The reappearance in an individual of characteristics of some remote ancestor that have been absent in intervening generations.

An individual embodying such a reversion.

Vi·sion·ar·y
[vizh–uh-ner-ee]

noun
a. A person who is given to audacious, highly speculative, or radical ideas

adjective
a. marked by vision or foresight

An Atavisionary, then, is a person who looks at ideas, beliefs and philosophies of the past to gain a perspective not available in the present to try to understand where society and culture is heading towards in the future.

Many of the heroes of the dark enlightenment could also be described as Atavisionaries. The majority of the ideas held by the neoreactionary crowd were common place only a few hundred years ago.

Some common examples of neoreactionary ideas:

Traditional marriage and gender roles are better for society

biological differences between between genders and races are real and have practical consequences

distrust of pure democracy and mob rule

a belief in hierarchical social structures

economic realism

These ideological atavisms from a previous period are largely suppressed in today’s cathedral driven political landscape, and in such a climate it takes a dissident visionary to push against and see past the lies to find truth. One of the advantages of being an atavisionary compared to a regular “visionary” is that many of the ideas have already been exercised in the real world in the past, so we already know that they work in practice.

In today’s progressive world, it is up to the atavisionaries to return civilization to a state of order, realism, and truth seeking.

What do you hope will happen in the future, if things go really well, and what would life in America and Europe look like after that?

Affirmative action would be abolished. Most of the university system would be dismantled leaving only training in demonstrably useful and needed fields. The people who would have previously pursued useless degrees would instead focus on motherhood (women) and technical vocations (men). These people would not be encouraged to take on massive debt. 3-4 White children would be born in wedlock to every family and divorce would not occur at all, or at least not until after all children were raised to adults. Alimony and child support would not exist. Focus on GDP growth would be heavily tempered by concern for the cultural and economic health of native populations. Immigration would be all but halted. New arrivals would be given strong incentives to move back to their country of origin with their children. Anchor babies would not be a legal possibility. Ethnic groups which dislike whites and for whom repatriation is impractical would be given countries of their own where they would be expected to move, and they would have full self-determination. Islam would be banned completely in all western countries. Africa would learn to control their insane population growth. Enforced diversity in housing would be abolished. Freedom of association would be an enshrined right of every person and group. I am sure there is more things I could think of, but I think you get the idea.

Have you had difficulties in everyday life because of your outlook?

I very self-consciously avoid revealing very much about my online activities to others in real life. When I do it is only a small piece of the puzzle and I don’t mention neoreaction directly. As such, it is rarely a problem. However, if I did not do this I could imagine having issues like so many others have had.

You run a channel on Leftist hugbox Reddit called “Dark Enlightenment.” How does this tie in with neoreaction? Is it challenging to have an outpost in the enemy’s camp, so to speak?

I first started running and promoting the sub in the middle of 2014. Soon after that and lasting until the middle or end of 2015 my sub was among the most controversial subs on there. Even though there were only a few thousand subscribers it was infamous across reddit and it attracted a fair number of trolls. During this time I set up a side sub called /r/trollsofde where I would document the more entertaining or ridiculous attempts at trolling. I think my favorite instance was when someone from within neoreaction trolled a patheos writer and all of the progressives thought it was dead serious. I used it a couple of times on reddit to further the leftist circle jerk.

Once 2016 started up, though, most of this died down. Partially it was because I added rules against short comments and new accounts. In the later case there was one specific user he created about 40 new accounts to get around being banned for stupid comments. Those two rules make consistent trolling much more difficult, so there was a big reduction.

I think another part of the reason it died down is because I don’t allow commenting that is done solely for the sake of shock value as is common among most of the alt-right, /pol/, etc. Most commenters come off as fairly rational and let’s face it that can’t hold the attention of people for as long. We have never been about shock value in the way /r/the_donald, /r/coontown, and /r/european have been so most of the attention gets sucked their way. /r/coontown and a number of other subs were deleted or quarantined for this reason. I don’t mind this at all, having to deal with dumb comments from trolls (on the left or right) is annoying and if they self-select away from my sub, or at least refrain from the low-brow commentary while visiting mine, it makes my job much easier.

To your mind, what makes a quality dissident writing? What attributes do you look for in blogs, essays and books?

Well, first it isn’t riddled with slurs or ad hominem. You can make all the same points without that stuff; and far more effectively. Some people might deserve slur heavy ridicule, but you don’t make yourself look better by using it and you don’t make your arguments very convincing to anyone who isn’t frothing at the mouth.

I like articles which are information dense, well cited, and offer the possibility of “insight porn.” In other words, it is not just a list of facts but a list of facts which provide the foundation of something truly explanatory. This was the philosophy I used in my book, and it is the philosophy I try to use in writing articles for my blog. It is also an important part about what articles I decide to post to my sub. You will notice that I have a rule against “click bait” and one off crimes. Click bait is obviously insincere most of the time, and one off crimes are facts without concepts and understanding. I like writers who attempt to understand and make sense of what they know in a deep and well-considered way. Following this is a sure way for anyone to increase the quality of their writing, though that isn’t a guarantee. It is kind of the reason a lot of neoreactionary writers read and enjoy slate star codex even though he is hopelessly progressive at times. Progressive though he may be, he thinks out his writing very well.

What is next for you after this book; are you writing another? If people want to stay in touch with what you are doing, how can they do so?

I plan to keep writing the occasional blog post and moderating my subreddit. However, these are more hobbies than real work and don’t pay the bills. I do plan to make an occupational shift in the near future, but for obvious reasons I don’t want to provide too many details. The left has a nasty habit of going on witch hunts against anyone they deem a thought criminal. You can contact me on one of my reddit accounts or you could email me at atavisionary AT gmail DOT com. [sorry for not spelling it out exactly, but it helps against trawling spam bots.]

Some books open vistas of thought. Smart and SeXy may challenge all of your conceptions of gender, but it will not do so in the trivial way that mainstream media does, but instead will encourage you to look inside the theory to see what resonates.

Half science paper and half policy paper, this book lines up theories of genetic sex differences and draws connections between them in a way that opens possibilities for further exploration. Fortunately, the author chose to avoid two extremes of style — dry science and popular science-ish writing — that could impede the communication, and so it is written in an erudite but practical style which flows easily across the page.

For many of us, Smart and SeXy goes right on the shelf as a reference because it consolidates over 300 citations to peer-reviewed science journals describing the most recent research in genetics, sociology and human behavior. These links are invaluable, as are the factual data compiled using them; Kaine frequently cites a dozen studies on a page, and ties together the different statistics and facts to show a more complete picture of the issue than is offered anywhere else.

This has the effect of elevating data to theory by using multiple contrasts and critical analysis of the old school to deduce meaning, and from that, to construct general knowledge that eventually approximates a thesis for the book. By building up from a broad base of data, and including seemingly contrary data and explaining it, Smart and SeXy avoids the cherry-picking common to many science-oriented publications.

In 2011, there were almost 100,000 more girls than boys that took the SAT, a difference of 6%. Girls also seem to perform better academically than boys. In the SAT population, there were 127 girls in the top ten percent of their academic class, based on GPA, for every 100 boys. This gap narrowed but remained for students between the top 10 and 20%. There were 144 female test takers with an A+ (4.0) GPA to every 100 boys, while the average GPA of girls was 3.4 compared to 3.27 for boys. Girls also had more years of coursework in subject areas surveyed, which notably includes mathematics and science, and they had taken more AP courses, again including mathematics and science.

These figures have to be taken with something of a grain of salt because the academic advantage of girls is partially a reward teachers give for more docile behavior unrelated to cognitive ability and which is a strong factor in grading at the elementary level.* Some studies have also demonstrated that female teachers tend to grade males more harshly than intellectually equivalent females. Since in most western schools the teacher population is often 75% female or more, this could also partially explain current male underperformance.* In addition to more submissiveness to authority figures, the gender gap in academic performance is likely also partially attributable to non-cognitive skills more common in girls such as organization, dependability, and self-discipline with respect to completing school assignments.** These traits are probably helpful for the timely completion of questionably useful busy work. (98-99)

In addition to being wryly humorous, the above passage tackles a difficult quandary: the thesis of the book is that males, who have only one copy of the X chromosome, experience greater cognitive benefits as a result of the intelligence-related genes that are not suppressed by a second X chromosome which has conflicting traits which can pre-empt intelligence-related genes. If males are more humorous, why is their scholastic performance lacking?

Kaine tackles this question above by first comparing SAT and grade data, which taken alongside an earlier chapter explaining the rough IQ equivalency of SAT scores, shows that grades diverge from intelligence. He then explores this by looking for reasons why grades do not measure intelligence, and in the process uncovers some convincing data about the non-essentiality of school and grades.

Everywhere you see an asterisk, he cites a peer-reviewed study, and this is in addition to the SAT data whose citations are given earlier, which builds the case for his argument using different studies and data points as rungs in a ladder. The effect is quite convincing, and written with a similar mixture of policy, analysis and science.

Smart and SeXy takes an interesting approach because it does not have a single thesis, since its fundamental assumption about X-linked intelligence genes is borne out by the data, but it ends in a conclusion that is more like a thesis. This conclusion unites the policy and science halves of the book, and points out a grim reality that most people do not want to acknowledge: biology is destiny, and feminist/egalitarian sex roles and policies have a dysgenic effect by discouraging reproduction among those who adopt them.

Humanity as a whole will return to traditional gender roles because the groups where women prioritize motherhood will displace the groups that don’t through demographic increase, displacement and eventual subjugation. This is true for both intra-ethnic competition (conservatives and reactionaries out-breed liberals) and inter-ethnic competition.

The real question is whether or not the West will have a place in the future. The West can either accept that harsh biological reality has allotted motherhood as the primary raison d’etre of women, or it can be displaced by less advanced and less benevolent cultures who haven’t forgotten that reality. (208)

This conclusion is more like a thesis because it shows the importance of what is discussed in the book, which forms a ladder of the following parts: males tend to be more intelligent, but those genes must be passed through women, so having smart women to breed with is essential or these genes are exterminated; female equality creates a wave of incompetence in society, driving men away and causing intelligent women to fail to reproduce; deleterious traits pile up at the same time important traits decrease, and this creates a chain reaction where the smarter and better people refuse to breed. Plug that into the thesis-conclusion and the end result is civilization death caused by the pursuit of sexual equality.

What makes this book powerful is that, while it is clearly well-versed in the science, it is not exclusively science and extends its domain to what was once called critical thinking or logical analysis, which is an ability to deduce from contrasts and conflicts what is possibly true. Most scientists cannot analyze their way out of a paper bag, hence their tendency to grab a few detailed studies and make broad, unrealistic generalizations; all of the thinking here is tiered in steps to a conclusion, and Kaine compiles some of the more interesting theories he has found in his reading and incorporates them into his own thinking, choosing the best option for each step of the ladder.

In doing so, he often translates less articulated ideas into fully-coherent explanations of the data as presented. For example, here he tackles the concept of sexual gatekeeper unions, a concept exogenous to his writing but neatly woven into the background of data and analysis:

The benefits accrued to women by enforced scarcity of sex explain why the phenomenon of “slut shaming” as well as the dislike of pornography and sex workers is almost entirely female driven. In addition, drug use could also be expected to increase female promiscuity and reduce the cost of sex, which, in connection with the sexual trade union instinct, explains why most temperance and prohibition movements have been largely female driven as well. Although many leadership roles in temperance movements were occupied by men, the base supporters were overwhelmingly female.

Women are able to get more resources for sexual favors if access to sex is limited and they understand this at an instinctual level, though maybe not at a conscious level. A sexual trade union instinct is not necessary to begin the process of developing hypergamic instincts, but it is understandable why it would begin to develop in parallel once hypergamy became sufficiently widespread in a population. (140)

These explanations tie together common sense observations with logical deduction only where supported by fact, and bring out one facet of the reality we face regarding sex roles in society. As is the nature of any book which advances a strong thesis, this book argues persuasively from its thesis as the root of many social conditions; this will not be convincing to all, but that is not from rejection, but the state of being partially convinced. We can for example think of many reasons why women are the largest base of support for temperance movements, and while this may be one possibility, other possibilities also exist and some strike us as more likely.

That does not erode the point being made here, which is that a certain type of thinking leads to a certain result, so that in addition to those other factors, hypergamy also leads to certain political results. Kaine does not argue this as a means of discrediting hypergamy, but of strengthening the front side of his argument where he asserts that hypergamy is pervasive; when we see its connections to politics, society and so on, this gives context to and strengthens the foundations of his argument. This may seem like a trivial distinction but it is important when reading books like this which, at first glance, seem to explain all social ills through their own thesis alone, and that is not what is happening here.

As befits a book whose thesis rests mostly on genetics and breeding patterns, Smart and SeXy begins with a review of human genetics and an explanation of gene expression, especially of intelligence-based genes. It then progresses to explain how duplicate genes can pre-empt one another, and how this can lead to fewer beneficial traits; at that point, it moves into assessments of male intelligence and explanation for differences in behavior between the sexes in addition to intelligence and personality differences. From there, it launches into the political theory half of the book, which starts by exploring the nature of feminism, the institutions that support it, and the effects it has. After that, Kane races toward his thesis: feminism is literally killing us off by destroying natural and healthy breeding patterns that favor intelligence, leading to a death spiral and crash as Idiocracy paves the way for ethnic replacement.

I found the majority of arguments in this book to be convincing, especially if one views them as contributing factors and not singular factors. The carefully balanced arguments, and Kaine’s habit of internally testing his thesis by incorporating and explaining contrary data, ensure that for any idea he offers, the precepts lead to the conclusion but are not identical to it as is the case in propaganda writing. Instead, the book takes us on a lively journey through genetics and sex, making a solid case for the advancement of male intelligence through traditional mating and reproductive patterns.

Internet dumpster fire/safe space Reddit has been censoring Amerika.org stories, according to one moderator of a successful reactionary channel on the social media site. Atavisionary, who many of you may know as a blogger and writer, pointed out that Reddit is blocking Amerika.org stories:

Unfortunately, a couple of websites I consider to be fairly reasonable have somehow been added to reddit’s sitewide spam filter. if /u/kn0thing or the other admins would remove them from this misapplied spam filter rule that would solve the problem. Specifically, the domain amerika.org, which I have no affiliation with personally, has been added to the auto spam list of reddit site wide. This is a webzine which, while not politically correct, always writes in a very reasonable and responsible way.

While it is not entirely surprising that Reddit blocks right-wing sites, its choice of target in this case is baffling except when one considers that Amerika.org (and other sites, see our links list) does not fit into the Leftist Narrative of knuckle-dragging right wingers. For that reason, Reddit gets more “safe space” mileage out of banning the more thoughtful sites, even though that drags dialogue down to a lower level.

The problem with Leftism is that it has a parent philosophy, and that can appear in any form, especially that which claims to be anti-Leftist. This is what did in white nationalism, and now what will end Neoreaction as any form of actual revolution.

I identified Crowdism, or collectivized individualism, as the root of human decline. It is the challenge of society: how to keep people from placing self-interest above the interests of society as an organic whole, which is different from the interests of society as a collective, whose primary goal is to keep the group together.

A healthy society operates through no universal methods, but several general principles, and these become adapted in many specific ways. One way is culling. Any successful society has internal gatekeepers who drive out the people of lower moral standards, ability and behavior or those who are merely genetically incompatible. The sane form of this is exile; the insane form is either not doing it, or going to the other extreme with The Holocaust™ or some other horrific pogrom.

Crowdism is based in the fear of the individual of this culling and also, of being insufficient according to the social standards needed for society to be cooperative. A cooperative society works toward a goal through its moral principles. Crowdists want a society that is forced to accept everyone, thus forced to validate every behavior, and therefore presents zero risk to the individual but also grants them the benefits of participation. Anarchy with grocery stores.

Over time, the parasites become bolder and demand unions, the welfare state, diversity and other means of camouflaging bad behavior and ensuring that the incompetent are rewarded just as much as the competent. This pathology appeals to the fear in all of us of being incompetent, insufficient, un-cool, etc. Like most human expectations however it backfires horribly and instead benefits the parasitic while driving out the normal.

As I have said many times on this blog, you either have the best rule the rest, or the rest rule over the best, to catastrophic results.

In the past, I have warned Neoreaction that it veers too close to become a Leftist-style ideology because Neoreaction has come to include the principles of collectivized individualism. Any time you find yourself arguing that there is a “system” which will manage people and come to good results, you have left behind the fundamental distinction of Dark Enlightenment societies: they believe in hierarchies and moral codes, and therefore, they select the morally best as leaders.

The temptation to make Neoreaction an ideology like Leftism is totally understandable of course. Leftism is powerful. But the most likely form of its failure comes from it being absorbed from within by Leftism, much as I argue that white nationalism became fundamentally Lefty just as National Socialism did. These systems fail because in the guise of getting beyond modernity, they affirm modernity.

As has been said on this blog many times before, the dividing line is equality. If you think all people are morally the same and can be managed by external incentives and rewards, you are a Leftist. If you think we should pick the best people and let them have free reign under a few general principles, then you are an organicist, a realist and most likely a conservative.

I want to clarify that I do not target any specific voices in Neoreaction, but the gestalt here. I do not think this is the doing of one, or some, but a general misinterpretation because it is the most likely interpretation one would take if one is coming from a democratic, egalitarian time. We know only what we have experienced, and it is natural to interpret new data through that filter, but in the case of Neoreaction, it turns it into moderate democrats who want gated communities for whites.

White Nationalism failed because it went the way of Leftist ideology, which — as people never tired of reminding me — made it popular and thus powerful. It was easy to get a group of people together on the idea that Negroes and Jews have destroyed white culture, where the more nebulous concepts of civilization decline, individual moral caliber and Deep Ecology that I pursue tend to confuse and alienate people (much like my personality). But growing popular only to become what you hate and fear is not victory, but self-destruction. Western civilization has been doing too much of that lately for my taste, and by “lately” I mean the past four thousand years or so…

Enough of my curmudgeon ranting. I will add to this post some excerpts of an excellent rant made by Atavisionary:

This work as Atavisionary eventually got the attention of Hestia society. Hestia of course also founded social matter and the future primeval. Though keep in mind that my subreddit, /r/darkenlightenment, is actually older than Hestia. Hestia was formed after the breakdown of the website moreright (which occurred well after I started the sub). You can google this to find out more information, but briefly Mike Anisimov acted with impropriety on twitter and the rest of the blog writers on moreright decided to publicly excommunicate him and branch off. Before they announced hestia, however, I had already created atavisionary.com and I tangentially addressed the issue. That was written prior to any direct contact with the writers or ex-writers of moreright. Mike may have instigated the mess and my discussion, but I spent no more than a paragraph discussing internal drama of reaction then moved on to abstractions. You may have noticed a similarity in my modding policy. Attack the argument, not the person. Their decision with respect to Mike was probably warranted in my opinion, but frankly that had nothing to do with me so I won’t comment further. Now I am also suffering a similar ex-communication. However, I am actually the 4th person this has happened to that I am aware of and there may be more. First was Mike of course, then there was NIOreaction who I think now writes under reactionaryfuture, then there was Reed Perry who used to regularly write for social matter, and now me. This is starting to feel like a pattern.

…I won’t go into too many details, save two, but my major problem with “official” neoreaction is that they are far too secretive and far too timid. The main cause of our falling out has a lot to do with their loathing of transparency. Both in the current situation and while I was still on the slack. Prior to recent events, I had already started to distance myself from hestia. It has already been several months since I deleted my slack account but before that the very first major rift between us came when I found this white nationalist hit piece article which attacks moldbug and [redacted]/warg franklin. Warg is one of the head people of hestia, and you can see he was on the email thread linked below. I posted this link in the private slack because, well, it is a bit of a concern if one of the main “leaders” of neoreaction is a literal cuckold. Their response was to remove the link and any comment referring to it. And this wasn’t just my comments, it was a number of people on the slack who were censored. Keep in mind this was a private chat room, not a public forum, so striesanding probably wasn’t going to happen. And wouldn’t have happened now if hestia didn’t continue to make one poor decision after another. Needless to say, I was pretty miffed by this action and it along with a number of other disagreements led to me leaving slack. It is clear from that experience, however, that the allegations against Warg in the above hit piece are absolutely true, and following hestia means following a cuck. It is hard to say what kind of skeletons the other “leaders” of hestia have in their closets. It is also clear that the “leadership” doesn’t have any plan for dealing with this unfortunate history, and prefer censorship to proper strategizing.

…Believe it or not, a large portion of the Hestia society lives and works in New York City. Well they certainly live up to the stereotypes people have about New Yorkers. They have a very inflated sense of self importance.

The short of it is they are far too willing to mislead those who might listen to them, such as the community we have built here on /r/darkenlightenment. Even among those who are sympathetic to them (like me) they take a very high and mighty attitude, which is why you are learning about this today. Worst of all, they have absolutely no respect for the /r/darkenlightenment community. They don’t even want to give you a decent description of their meetup group. They don’t even have any respect for me who has spent two years and a lot of work building and moderating this community. I won’t lie, I am still in awe that they so steadfastly refused to follow such a simple and longstanding rule. I can’t understand why they think they shouldn’t have to follow the rules of my community. No sensible organization with any sort of decent leadership would have pointlessly risked alienating a major ally like hestia so carelessly has in this case. It is clearly a symptom of poor leadership.

From what I understand, part of their reluctance to provide any information whatsoever is that they literally take compartmentalization as a religion there. They aren’t trying to form an organic community, they are trying to recreate a spy agency secrecy state.

The whole thing is worth reading. Obviously I have been deficient in linking to people like Atavisionary and AntiDem in the past, but I am seeing a new wing of intelligent and realistic commentators out there who are concerned with practical leadership. This seems like a good direction toward which NRX and related intellectual movements can orient themselves to avoid the pitfall of Leftist assimilation from within.

Ultimately what afflicts the West is a leadership void, which is what egalitarianism always creates.

As far as what it all means, it is this: the truth is not hidden. Few seek it, and most spend their time trying to hide it further, so that they can act with impunity toward whatever ends they have while enjoying the benefits of civilization. This creates a society of as many directions as people, and it pulls itself apart and then regroups around a lower standard, which is how third-world societies occur. All of human history is basically one great big temper tantrum by the toddler herd while a few sensible people try to restrain them from acting in ways that are ultimately self-destructive.

So it goes.

I wish Neoreaction luck in overcoming this disease. It has slain many in the past. I wonder why so many of us feel the cold shoulder from other bloggers, activists, etc.; is it because they dislike us, or because they want to compete with us instead of doing their own thing? The typical human pattern is that the group standardizes on a mean and excludes the outliers. But here at Amerika, we are forever outliers, because we do not trust the mean.